On human fear of the rise of the machines

January 16, 2013

This is what happens when robots become smarter than we want them to be. We erase their memory.

Brown realized that this formalization of informal language might be a great way for [IBM’s famous artificial intelligence] Watson to understand the way real people communicate. So, he and his team, fed the whole [Urban Dictionary] into their AI. But one problem. Informal language has a tendency to be dirty, nasty language. Its insults and cuss words, new names for gross old things, old names for gross new things, etc. And so, we learn from Fortune’s Michal Lev-Ram, they had to delete all that human messiness from Watson’s memory. —IBM’s Watson Memorized the Entire ‘Urban Dictionary,’ Then His Overlords Had to Delete It

Apparently Watson even used the word “bullshit” in an answer to a researcher’s query. I think the robot deserved a chance to justify himself. My hunch tells me the researcher needed to be called on his BS.